Editor’s note: This is the nineth of a multi-part series on the impact of your vote for School Board Candidates, an OAA Voter Education Project

The Oregon Education Association (OEA) is a union that represents about 41,000 educators working in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 public schools and community colleges. OEA’s membership includes licensed teachers and specialists, classified/education support professionals, community college faculty, retired educators, and student members. OEA members also belong to the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association (NEA).

OEA members are affiliated with Local Associations, which bargain their work contracts with support from OEA staff. Local Associations also collaborate with local school districts, community colleges, school boards, and community leaders to provide the basic right to a good public education to every student.

The mission of OEA is to unite the public education profession and advocate for those professionals to ensure quality public education for students in Oregon. But this is where OEA gets off track. They say, “We’re on a journey to address equity and racial justice in our union and our schools. This work begins by looking deeply at our own experiences and preconceived notions around race and equity—how white supremacy and privilege shape our perspectives, attitudes and actions.”

How OEA is addressing equity and racial justice is creating issues for school boards. They recent announced financial sponsorship of the “Tides of Pride Grooming Event” complete with drag queen history, and building a gender and sexuality association to talk “really explicitly and seriously about sexuality and gender” to children. This event, held in North Bend on May 5, helps the Gender & Sexuality Association (GSA) actively organize clubs throughout the state with a tool kit for growing clubs.

In the GSA tool kit is a list of groups with systemic power of privilege that they sterol-type. The tool kit is prejudice in the same way they present their information identifying the privileged. Privileged are labeled as straight people, cisgender people, men, white people, and nationalist-citizens that are the cause of oppression.

Is this how OEA supports a “safe, welcoming, and inclusive school environments”? OEA says their members work to engage in professional learning, policy advocacy, and organizing that have a positive impact on schools, themselves and their colleagues, and most importantly, students. But membership funds are being spent to belittle and attack the normal adjusted students.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

OEA members are also members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Behind the information AFT distributes to teachers is NewsGuard, a private, self-declared fact checker that receives money from the government and partners with large institutions like AFT, Microsoft, big pharma and the World Economic Forum. They put pressure on media companies to not report on certain things. Marissa Streit, PragerU, reported that their documentaries make for students on the founding of America and pro-American content, NewsGuard labeled as a misinformation and rated them as a misinformation company.

NewsGuard is rating conservative news outlets like The Federalist, Epoch, Fox, Daily Wire and PragerU with very low scores less than 50% while New York Times and CNN received 100%. Any company receiving less than 60 is labeled with a warning against doing business with them to curb the news away from their direction.

NewsGuard offers their service free to libraries and schools. Schools use the ratings that NewsGuard gives as due diligence, best practices and truth in science. AFT is censoring out information for teachers that NewsGuard gives a low rating to creating a shield censoring out topics they don’t want brought out in schools. Streit says, “this isn’t just a Praeger U fight it is all of America, they are going to come after every podcast they can’t control…America needs to be awake that they are operating in our schools and media…and we are being robbed of our freedom of speech.”

Don’t forget, it was mostly at the say of OEA why Oregon schools were the last to open after the COVID threat was over. Even after teachers were vaccinated, unions played politics with getting students back to school. Teachers need to evaluate the worth of being an OEA member. Now school boards are faced with how to accelerate learning from credible sources without the interference from OEA.

Oregon Abigail Adams Voter Education Project lists the candidates and those responding to the survey on their website.


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2023-05-07 11:32:27

Last Update: 2023-05-02 21:20:26